December 2004 Archives

Knowledge Jolt with Jack has moved to a new host, you shouldn't need to do anything new.  However, please contact me if you notice any problems with the site or the web feed....

Bill Ives is busy organizing a day-long KM Cluster event "Inside Social Networks" on January 21, 2005. Quite an array of people involved.

Merlin of 43 Folders describes the Good Stuff about Getting Things Done. And specifically, he talks about his new understanding of what a project is: It has more than one physical action. Its desired outcome is valuable, desirable, and well articulated (even if it needs to change or adapt as the...

Anjo Anjewierden asks A Very Stupid KM Question: The newspaper carried an article on companies that are afraid to lose their experienced personnel because of retirement. I'll provide the "very stupid KM question" right away: is it not the essence of KM to take action before it goes wrong? I think...

I am moving hosts. If you see this message, then the hosting service has been changed, and I am in the process of moving the last month's worth of comments to this new location....

Here is another end-of-year meme that comes via Liz Lawley: what's happened to you in 2004?

Matt Mower turned up an entertaining Aristotle quote from David Gurteen's knowledge quotations mailing:"It is easy to perform a good action, but not easy to acquire a settled habit of performing such actions."*** Aristotle (384 BC-322 BC) Greek Philosopher ***On the other hand the first step into a new habit is...

My current web host and domain registrar has vanished, and I am trying to get my domain to point to a new host. If you check the whois database for jackvinson.com, you will see Simon Keslake listed with a contact email that does not garner a response. Are there any readers...

Another web-meme, this time what your browser history tells you about your personality.

Jon Udell has some interesting comments about blog becoming an official term in the English language.

This is just too much. Having a Bad Day. Thanks to my brother-in-law. My brother vaguely recalls having seen this before....

elearnspace makes an important observation about participation with respect to the sharable book-marking tools out there in Furl instead of blog:One of the complaints often directed at blogging is that not everyone is a blogger - not everyone has the interest, time or the skills to write for others. While glancing...

Ian Yorston found an interesting article by Charles Leadbeater, "How to Profit from Ignorance." While knowledge is important, it is also useful to know where my expertise ends, so I don't bother myself with trying to figure out things that others already know.

Abbott Laboratories have an opening for a "Web Master and Project Lead" in their Global Knowledge Resource Systems Team:Library Information Resources (LIR) provides enterprise-wide access to published business, medical, scientific and technical information in support of knowledge workers at all levels of the organization. In addition, the LIR is beginning to...

One of the ideas that have been bouncing around my head lately is the idea that participation in online communities is limited by the ability and willingness of the community members to write.

Clare Hart, CEO of Factiva, was the guest of honor at Tuesday's KM Chicago meeting. The topic was a summary of the recent 2004 CKO Summit, which Factiva and TFPL sponsor.

Mopsos has written an interesting piece on knowledge management (via blogging) in the corporate world, Blogging to become a legal obligation? In it he describes a conversation with a lawyer who suggested that all of an employee's knowledge belongs to the company. While that seems rather extreme, it has some interesting...

"To succeed in the Knowledge Age, people who have passed through today's formal education system - meaning most adults in Western economies - will need an order-of-magnitude leap in their capacity to acquire, assimilate, and share knowledge." This familiar concept starts an article by Donald Norris, Jon Mason and Paul Lafrere,...

KM Chicago hosts its end of year meeting and holiday party tomorrow night at Factiva's offices in the loop from 5 to 7 pm. Please see the official announcement for RSVP and location.Veritas: "The Truth about what CKO's Discuss when they Meet"Clare Hart, CEO Factiva, will share insights from the Global...

The University of Chicago and Fox and Obel offer a two-hour course entitled "Coffee Makes You Think."

David Wilcox at Designing for Civil Society has some interesting thoughts about how participants perceive forced efforts at engendering participation. Be sure to check out his mindmaps. The mindmapping exercise brought home to me that it may just be that participation is peripheral to the way most people lead their lives....

Yes, we really are planning a BlogWalk in Chicago in the coldest month of the year.

BlogWalk 6 is planned for Chicago on 21 January 2005.

Another thought inspired by discussion with a colleague. We chatted about his recent reading and thoughts about user-centered design and Alan Cooper's writings. Cooper has the idea that architecture is really about brining People, Technology and Purpose together into a working whole (picture a triangle). Each leg of the triangle represents...

Two posts inspired by conversations with a consulting colleague, Nick Hoyt. The first on a how the lens of Industrialization affects knowledge management and design. There have been many conversations about moving knowledge management away from the traditional idea of (Frederick W) Taylorian Management to a different form that is less...

Short descriptions of the set of articles on blogging in the December 2004 Communications of the ACM.

Wired Magazine had a piece last month on people using SNA in interesting ways, Science's Next Big Thing, such as examining peer review & citation networks to help decide where science grant funding should go. The best part is the link to They Rule, a flash-based tool by which you can...

Clark Ching points to yet more evidence that multitasking is dumb:By now, we all know that switching between tasks - multitasking - makes each task take longer and is PURE EVIL.Here's an article that talks about the hidden costs of switching to our personal efficiency - they say that multitasking makes...

The backchannel panel at last month's CSCW has generated a enough noise that it even showed up in a USA Today article on backchannel.

Lilia Efimova and Stephanie Hendrick recently published another version of "In search for a virtual settlement: An exploration of weblog community boundaries" and encourage people to comment. I do so and suggest some directions for future research.